Known and Unknown - Donald Rumsfeld [389]
The fourth and final stage in formulating strategy is executing the chosen course of action. And this too can change based on circumstances. For example, we had to make multiple adjustments to our assumptions about the formation, development, focus, and deployment of Iraqi security forces as the situation changed over time, but we remained consistent in our emphasis on helping them develop their own capabilities. No matter how careful the preparation, fortune plays a role in all plans and necessitates the recalibration or abandonment of key assumptions, and therefore major changes in the plan. Oversight of these constant adjustments requires careful balance to avoid the extremes of disengagement and micromanagement. Kissinger once described Anwar Sadat, one of the most impressive men I have ever met, as “free of the obsession with detail by which mediocre leaders think they are mastering events, only to be engulfed by them.”17
Strategy is not linear. It is never completed until the challenge at hand has been resolved. The means must be continually reviewed to see whether they still serve the goals, and if the goals are sensible and realistic in light of one’s means and unfolding events. There is a danger that policies and courses of action can acquire a momentum of their own. Continuing them without adjustment or reconsideration is often easier than developing new ones. Inertia can be an obstacle to formulating and maintaining sound strategy.
In wartime, strategy and statesmanship require a clear-eyed understanding of the enemy and its ideology and a clear articulation of both by the nation’s leaders. After 9/11, though, our government never came to such an understanding. With the benefit of nearly a decade of hindsight, we ought to have more precisely labeled our enemies as violent Islamists. President Bush and others were properly careful not to foster or be seen as fostering the idea that Islam—a faith observed by more than one billion people across the world—was our enemy. To succeed we would require the assistance of millions of Muslims—the only ones who could forcefully reject, marginalize, and ultimately defeat the extremist elements within their faith who are our enemies. We did not want to unintentionally antagonize the overwhelming majority who shared our views. But we were wrong not to forcefully communicate that we are fighting an extremist ideology rooted in Islam.
Islamists who preach and lay the foundations for jihadist violence pose a serious challenge to liberal democracy. Paradoxically, America’s finest traits—our respect for religion and individual liberty—make our country particularly vulnerable to an enemy whose ideology is based in religion. But reluctance to face up to Islamism, to confront it directly and work actively to counter it, has been and remains even at this writing a serious and costly hesitation in our body politic since 9/11.
According to their own utterances, writings, and propaganda, Islamists seek to reestablish the caliphate, an empire that stretched from Spain to India in the tenth century, and expand it around the globe. The network of our terrorist enemies comprises a diverse group of people, but what links them are totalitarian, expansionist, and revolutionary distortions of Islam. Some Islamist ideals are represented by Shia ayatollahs in Iran; others by bin Laden and Sunni al-Qaida terrorists in Pakistan. All Islamists, however, promote replacement of the world’s international